unidentified thoughts

Printed books somehow looks classy, intelligent, and sophisticated, but I don’t think printed book is a format that most people prefer to choose. It’s easily damaged, thick, heavy, and you can’t read it in a relaxed way such as using a tablet. We definitely need ebooks if we want to make a “progress” in our civilization.

eBooks, similar to various purchasable digital content always have their own issues in Indonesia. Either the reader (software/hardware) is not available (e.g. Amazon Kindle), the credit card is not accepted, and I never seen any popular book store which accepts PayPal. This is always the case, until I know about kobobooks. The only truly global ebook store that I know of currently.

iBooks, the recently hyped iPhone/iPad app from Apple is just too severely limited. It surely has a beautiful design, but the latest version 1.1 can’t do anything in iOS 4. Although, I know this is a problem everywhere, not just in particular countries. It doesn’t matter where the epubs are originated — the iBooks Store or from iTunes — it’s just unable to read the downloaded or synched epubs. Well, I trust that Apple will fix the app soon, because this is a global problem, but that’s not the end of the issue. The iBook Store doesn’t have lots of content, at least in Indonesia store. I tried various keywords to search in the iBooks Store, the results are not satisfactory. It’s worse than Kobo Books Store.

How I really hate this country-based laws and restrictions. This is the internet, it’s not dealing with physical materials. Why can’t we get over of this “country/regional border” issues?

It’s not like the widespread distribution of ebooks will lower the profit of the publisher or it will create a damaging effect to the author. Piracy itself is not strictly related to where the store is opened. I had witnessed lots of pirated books even in the current situation where ebooks distribution is limited. Pirated books are widespread because most early stage ebooks store and the reader are not convenient ways for most consumers to access it anywhere. This has changed since the epub format, various multi-platform ebooks reader, iPad, and iBooks were introduced but I still witnessed the same “xenophobic” situation at some level.

Take an example from the App Store, where a conveniently accessible global store and a great device to access it resulting in the increase of purchase of digital content. Well, it’s fortunate that there is Kobo and a sole eBook reader such as Stanza which enables me to read, search, download, and sync ebooks.

I spent some time today to write an application with a status bar using Mac OS X 10.6 SDK. This status bar app is not a full blown application with menu bar, etc. A popular example of this kind of app is Droplr.

After several hours of navigating the docs, I was lost, and I decided to use Google to search about the implementation of this kind of app. Surprisingly, I found it in just one query of the keyword “NSStatusBar Mac OS X”. But, the funny thing is, it’s written in relation to the development of an app using PyObjC (Python - ObjC).

While if I tried to search through the Apple docs with the keyword of “NSStatusBar”, it takes me to the NSStatusBar example code. Well, it does provide me an example of how to use NSStatusBar, but it doesn’t have any reference to the concept of agent.

I finally understand about the technical term of “agent”:

Agents have acquired a variety of different names over the years. These include background-only applications (BOAs), faceless background-only applications (FBAs), and UI elements (implying that the agent displays some GUI, but is not a full blown application with a menu bar). These names are more-or-less irrelevant to this discussion. What is relevant, and what distinguishes different types of agents, is how the agent is launched.

UI elements is the type of app that I was writing.

I know that NSStatusBar is not related to how an app is launched. So, I was already wrong there. I also tried to search through NSApplication, and whether it’s possible to hide the menu bar. It turns out that hiding the menu bar completely is not what I’m looking for. I never thought that hiding the application menu while not hiding the menu bar completely is related to how the app is launched.

What if I didn’t search about this using Google? I would probably spend hours and maybe days, just to figure out how to launch the app as an agent with UIElement. This is because I didn’t know about agent, and I didn’t know that the Info dictionary provides me a way to do that. Although, I should remember why iPhone OS is using Info dictionary: because it’s derived from Mac OS X app launching system.

Generally, if I compared Mac OS X docs to iPhone OS docs, then I would consider iPhone OS docs as easier and more accommodative to beginners in programming. I maybe wrong, but this is also how I felt when I wrote a System Preferences app (Preference Pane) using SFAuthorizationView.